An O.K. Day in Harlem

When Derek Trucks, the guitar wizard, was in the Allman Brothers Band, and they were playing one of their perennial stands at the Beacon Theatre, on the Upper West Side, he always walked to the gigs, sometimes with long cigar detours through Central Park.

“Gotta walk off the night before,” Trucks said recently. He and his wife, the singer Susan Tedeschi, were walking east on 133rd Street, up from the Hudson into Harlem and a frosty headwind. There’d been no night-before this time, save for sushi and sake downtown, but they wanted to poke around the neighborhood, in anticipation of an engagement at the Apollo Theatre this week with their own group, the Tedeschi Trucks Band.

“I remember the first time I came up here, like twenty years ago,” Trucks said. “Yonrico Scott, the drummer in my old band, he’s from Detroit and is an awesome, crazy individual. He played football under Bear Bryant. His mom is a hairdresser and gospel singer in Detroit, used to do little Stevie Wonder’s hair. Anyway, Rico was wearing dashikis and was super Afrocentric. He was, like, ‘Young brother, you can’t go up to Harlem by yourself. No, you’re coming with me. We’re gonna go get a bean pie.’ I still have this book that I bought on the street that time. It was where I learned about the reptilian race, all the super-kooky alien-conspiracy stuff.”

Trucks is thirty-six, with a ponytail, a bushy blond beard, and a beatific air. He had on maroon corduroys, an oilskin jacket, and an indigo wool cap. Tedeschi, forty-five, blond, with a mischievous grin, was in jeans, peacoat, and prescription Ray-Bans—looks like Boston, sings like Memphis. Their two kids, eleven and thirteen, were at home, in Jacksonville.

Tedeschi met Trucks in 1999, when her band was touring with the Allmans and Trucks was still too young to buy beer. She described acting cranky during a sound check, while Trucks, to her mortification, looked on. “Then I remember walking up the steps behind the stage, and I felt someone grab my leg. I look down, and it’s Derek. I was, like, ‘What are you doing?’ ” She glanced over at him. “You were frisky,” she said. Her bandmates didn’t love the idea of her seeing him. “They were, like, ‘You can’t hang out on that bus, with the Allman Brothers.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because they do _drugs! _’ ”

“I didn’t have to win over her parents,” Trucks said. “I had to win over her band.”

The street dead-ended at City College, so they cut across it, then bushwhacked down through a dilapidated park to St. Nicholas Avenue, where 133rd Street began again—the Swing Street leg. They ducked into a juice bar with a “No Obscene Language” sign on the door.

“Where you all from?” the proprietor asked.

“Jacksonville,” Tedeschi said. “We’re playing the Apollo on January 26th.”

“Congratulations!”

They ordered vegetable juice and bean soup, and went outside to sit on a stoop and bat around anecdotes about their heroes—most of whom one or both had played with. Hubert Sumlin, B. B. King, Solomon Burke, Wayne Shorter, Willie Nelson, Levon Helm. “Usually, the greats are really humble and sweet,” Trucks said. “It’s the mediocre-to-a-little-better-than-good, or the people who are kind of bullshit, who are the assholes.”

“B.B. treated me like a granddaughter,” Tedeschi said. “For a long time, he didn’t want to meet Derek, because he knew an old boyfriend of mine who didn’t treat me right. He didn’t trust any guitar-player dudes. But then he finally met Derek and got to hear him play and said, ‘Now I know why you wanna marry him. I wanna marry him!’ ”

When Tedeschi was ten, she was an understudy in the Broadway production of “Annie.” “During the auditions, I was staying at the New York Hilton hotel with my grandmother,” she said. “The Bee Gees were staying there. I was running through the revolving doors to tell my grandma that the Bee Gees were coming, and I ran into this dude, all dressed in black, and he was, like, ‘Slow down, little lady. Where you going in such a hurry?’ And I was, like, ‘The Bee Gees are coming!’ He said, ‘You like them?’ I said, ‘They’re O.K. They’re singers, and I’m a singer.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m a singer, too. Maybe we’ll get to play together someday.’ Afterward, all these people ran over to me and said, ‘What did Johnny Cash say?’ ”

In 2012, Tedeschi and Trucks performed at the White House, in a tribute to Etta James. “We’d met the President a handful of times, to the point where he recognized us, but he’d never seen Sue sing or me play,” Trucks said. “I made it a point to look down at his face when she first stepped up to the mike and started singing, and you could see his surprise—he was not expecting that.” ♦